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THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
ST. GEORGE AND THE DRAGON
GOOD FRIDAY: A PLAY IN VERSE
LOLLINGDON DOWNS AND OTHER
POEMS
THE FAITHFUL: A PLAY
PHILIP THE KING AND OTHER
POEMS
THE DAFFODIL FIELDS
DAUBER: A POEM
A POEM AND TWO PLAYS
ALSO
GALLIPOLI
One volume, cr. 8vo., illustrated, 2s.6d.net
THE OLD FRONT LINE
Cr. 8vo., illustrated, 2s. 6d. net
London : WILLIAM HEINEMANN
This Edition is limited to two
hundred and fifty numbered copies,
of which this is No. „Z.?~ -..-"-~
THE BATTLE OF THE
SOMME
BY
JOHN MASEFIELD
LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
TO
MAJOR THE HON. NEVILLE LYTTON
LONDON : WILLIAM HEINEMANN. 1919
FOREWORD
I have been asked to write a few words of preface
to this little book.
While I was in France, in the late summer and
autumn of 19 16, it was suggested that I should
write a History of the Battle of the Somme, then in
its second stage or act. In discussing the plan of
the book, it was decided that I should begin with
some account of the attacks upon Verdun (which the
Battle of the Somme ended), and end with the taking
of Bapaume, then hoped for, but not expected to
happen at once. In order that I might write with
full knowledge, some arrangements were planned, by
which I could go again to Verdun, to visit some
positions which I had not seen. It was made
possible for me to go to the Somme, certain intro-
ductions were given to me, and I was formally
requested to write the History.
After some delay, I was permitted to go again to
the Somme battlefield, and to live on or near it for
those months of 1917 when our Armies were ad-
vancing in all that area. It was made possible for
1
2 FOREWORD
me to watch the advance of our Armies from point to
point and from valley to crest, and to trace those old,
much more grim advances, in the area from which
the enemy had been beaten in the first months of the
attack. During those months I walked over every
part of the Somme battlefield in which British troops
had been engaged, over every part at least twice, and
over many parts, which specially moved me, such as
Delville Wood, High Wood, Pozieres, Mouquet
Farm, Thiepval, and the Hawthorn Ridge, more
times than I can remember. I came to know that
blasted field as well as I know my own home. I saw
much there which I am not likely to forget.
In June, 1917, when I felt that I knew the ground
so intimately well, from every point of view, that I
could follow any written record or report of the
fighting, I returned to England, hoping to be per-
mitted to consult the Brigade and Battalion diaries,
as in 1 g 16, when I wrote a history of the campaign
in Gallipoli. It was not possible for me to obtain
access to these documents, and as only four others,
of any worth, existed, my plan for the book had to be
abandoned.
Feeling that perhaps some who had lost friends in
the battle might care to know something of the
landscape in which the battle was fought, I wrote a
little study of the position of the lines, as they stood
on July 1, 1916. This study, under the title The Old
Front Line, was published at the end of 1917. I then
FOREWORD 3
attempted to write an account of the battle from
what I had seen and heard, and had written as much
as is here printed, when I was turned to other
work, of another kind, many miles from Europe and
the war.
Scanty as the books are, they would have been
scantier but for him to whom I dedicate them. By
his kindness and forethought much which would
have been difficult and disappointing was made
possible and pleasant. The disappointment of
having to forego the task of writing of our Armies in
their victory was but a small thing when set beside
the memory of so much that was an inspiration and
a delight.
JOHN MASEFIELD.
THE
BATTLE OF THE SOMME
A moment before the whistles blew, in the morning
of July i, 1916, when the Battle of the Somme began,
the No Man's Land, into which our men advanced,
was a strip of earth without life, made smoky, dusty,
and dim by explosions which came out of the air
upon it, and left black, curling, slowly fading, dust
and smoke-devils behind them. Into this smoke and
dust and dimness, made intenser by the stillness of
the blue summer morning, came suddenly the run of
many thousands of men at the point of death. Not
less than twenty thousand men clambered up the
parapet at that instant. They tripped and tore
through the wire, already in lanes, and went on to
their fronts, into the darkness of death, cheering
each other with cries that could be heard above the
roaring and the crashing of the battle. On the
instant, before all the men were out of the trenches,
5
6 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
the roaring lifted up its voice as the fire doubled and
the enemy machine guns opened.
Many men among those thousands were hit as they
showed above the parapet, many others never
cleared the wire ; but the rest drew clear and went
forward, some walking, some running, most of them
in a kind of jog-trot, some aligned in a slow advance
or in rushes of platoons, till the green river of the
No Man's Land was dotted with their moving bodies
throughout the sector. Perhaps not many of all
those thousands knew what was happening even
quite close at hand, for in those times all souls are
shaken, and the air was dim, and the tumult terrible.
Watchers in our old lines saw only a multitude of
men crossing a dimness which kept glittering. They
saw many of the runners falling as they ran, some
getting up and going on, others moving a little,
others lying still. They saw as it were dead lines,
where all the runners fell, even the strongest. They
saw promising swarms of men dropping in twos or
threes, till the rush was only a few men, who went on
until they fell like the others and lay in little, heaps
in their tracks. There was nothing to show why
they fell. Men looked for them to rise and go on
with the few little leading figures who were drawing
near to the enemy wire. They could see no enemy.
They could not even see the jets of smoke, hardly
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 7
bigger than the puffs blown from a kettle at the
instant of boiling, which spurted from enemy machine
guns along the whole line.
Within a few minutes, the second and third waves
were following on the first, not knowing, in that
darkness of dust and tumult, what success had been
won, if any.
Our attack was made on a front of sixteen miles.
To the south of this, at the same moment, the
French attacked on a front of nine miles. Let the
reader imagine any narrow strip of twenty-five miles
known to him — the course of the Thames, say, from
London to Maidenhead, or from Pangbourne to
Oxford — suddenly rushed by many thousands of
men, many of them falling dead or maimed upon the
way. For the look of the charge let him remember
some gust of wind on a road in autumn when the
leaves are lying. The gust sweeps some array of
leaves into the road and flings them forward in a
rush strangely like the rush of men as seen from a
distance. As in the rush of men, many leaves drop
out, crawl again forward, cease, quiver, and lie
still ; many others lose touch or direction, the im-
pulse may falter, the course swerve, but some are
whirled across the road into the gutters at the other
side.
8 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
To cross the No Man's Land took from a minute
to two minutes of time. Perhaps most of those who
were in that attack were too dizzy with the confusion
and tumult, the effort to keep touch and the straining
to find out what was happening to the flanks and in
front, to take stock of their own sensations. These
things have been said about the attack :
(a) " I heard the man behind me slip on the
ladder. ' The damned thing,' he said. ' I'll
miss the bloody train/ They were putting over
whizz-bangs rather a lot; but I didn't notice
any near me. I felt just ordinary.
" Their wire had been nicely cut. I'd been
afraid we might be hung up while we cut it. I
heard a whut-whut-whut, just like that, just
alongside my ears. ' You s,' I said, ' that's a
bloody machine gun in your bloody wire,' I said.
So afterwards, when it was all over, I went back,
and they'd got a bloody little machine gun
covered over in a shell-hole, shooting through a
kind of box in a sort of funnel, along with two
Boches ; but they'd been caught with a bomb, it
looked like."
(b) "I'd had a bet with one of our fellows that
there was a sniper's post just where I said it was,
'cos I'd figured it out it must be about there.
So when I went over I thought, ' We'll see now
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 9
who'll get them fags.' The funny part of it was
we were both wrong about the sniper. I don't
know where he was."
(c) " About an hour before we went over, they
got on to our jumping-off trenches and fairly
plugged us with a lot of heavy stuff as well ; so
when we went across I said, * You s, you
wait till I get in among you; I'll get some of
my own back.' "
(d) " Going across wasn't so bad, but when we
started to consolidate our bit of trench we kept
running out of bombs. If we could have had a
good supply of bombs all day the Fritzes would
have had no show at all. Bombs are heavy to
carry. One of our bombers must have been hit
as he was coming up. He was wearing his
bomber's jacket all full of bombs, and they blew
him all to pieces. They bombed us out after-
wards. They held us up at the end where we
were, up against the sandbags, and then they got
up like to the side and bombed us clean out.
Just before they got us out we found some hair-
brush bombs ; they don't have them much now,
but they had that lot all right."
(e) "What did I think while I was going
over ? I thought my last hour had come.
They'd got a machine gun every five yards, it
io THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
sounded like. ' By God,' I said, * give me London
every time/ "
(/) " It's my opinion there'll be some queer
revelations about this war after it's all over. I
often thought of that when we were in it ; not
about the soldiers so much, but about the
financiers."
(g) "After we'd got back into our trenches we
saw a big Boche jump up on to the parapet and
wave a great big Red Cross flag, and we saw
their men go out with stretchers, to bring in our
wounded, we thought. Then we saw they
were shooting at our wounded. Whenever they
stirred they turned machine guns on them ; we
could see the bullets going phut all round them.
So then we looked to see what they were doing
with the stretchers. What they were bringing
in under the Red Cross flag was our Lewis guns
which our poor chaps had been carrying.
" All day long they kept us from bringing in
any of our wounded. Whenever our stretcher-
bearers went out they turned machine guns on
to them at once. But one of our fellows went
out and brought in about twenty, one after the
other. He carried them in on his back till he
was quite worn out. His name was Smiley or
some such name."
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME n
(h) " The Boche varied from place to place.
Just near where we were he was very decent,
and sent us in a list of the names of the prisoners
he'd taken. Afterwards we found that he'd
buried our dead and put up crosses to them :
1 To a brave Englander.' ' To brave English
soldiers.' This was a fine thing to have
done ; for it wasn't healthy by any means out
in front of his wire. They were Bavarians who
did this."
(i) " Before we went over we were in a
shallow jumping-off trench. It wasn't a trench,
it was really the bank beside a road. We were
being shelled with whizz-bangs. We hadn't
any real shelter, but were crouched down under
the bank. I looked along my men. Some were
cursing and mad; I don't think they knew what
they were doing, but about every other man was
praying."
(j) " I noticed that several men were inclined
to take off their clothes before the attack. It
may be fear in some cases, but then it was very
hot, and there was the feeling that one would
advance better free. One wants all one's
strength, and the things pressing on the body
seem to choke you. During the attack I saw
one man who was stark mad and stark naked,
12 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
both, running round in the No Man's Land,
yelling at the top of his voice. They got him
into a dressing-station, and they had a bad time
with him, for he wouldn't speak, he would only
yell, and they couldn't make out whether he
was a Boche or one of our own chaps. I don't
know what became of him. Probably when
they got him down and gave him a bath and
cut his hair he remembered himself."
(k) " They call us 'the poor bloody infantry.'
We deserve the name, for we get into most of the
trouble when there is any, and all of the mud
when there isn't. But I say that the airmen
have the hardest time, for they're in danger the
instant they leave the ground; and they live
over the enemy lines, in a cloud of shrapnel,
and they come right down to take photographs,
or to draw fire when they are spotting batteries,
or to scatter infantry. On the 1st of July they
were just over our heads, as bold as brass.
They spotted for us, and when the Boche
counter-attacked they dived right down and
took them on with their machine guns. When
they come down, I believe they fall asleep at
once from nervous strain."
(/) " I made up my mind that I was going to
be killed. I was to be in the third wave. While
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 13
I was waiting, during the last half-hour, I kept
saying to myself : * In half an hour you will be
dead. In twenty-five minutes you will be dead.
In twenty minutes you will be dead. In a
quarter of an hour you will be dead.' I wondered
what it would feel like to be dead. I thought
of all the people I liked, and the things I wanted
to do, and told myself that that was all over,
that I had done with that ; but I was sick with
sorrow all the same. Sorrow isn't the word
either: it is an ache and anger and longing to
be alive. There was a terrific noise and con-
fusion, but I kept thinking that I heard a lark ;
I think a lark had been singing there before the
shelling increased. A rat dodged down the
trench among the men, and the men hit at it,
but it got away. I felt very fond of all my men.
I hoped that they would all come through it.
I had told them some time before to 'fix
swords.' I wondered how many of them would
unfix swords, and when. Then I thought,
' When I start I must keep a clear head. I
must remember this and this and this.' Then
I thought again, ' In about five minutes now
I shall be dead.' I envied people whom I had
seen in billets two nights before. I thought,
' They will be alive at dinner-time to-day, and
14 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
to-night they'll be snug in bed ; but where shall
I be ? My body will be out there in No Man's
Land ; but where shall I be ? What is done to
people when they die?' The time seemed to
drag like hours and at the same to race. The
noise became a perfect hell of noise, and the
barrage came down on us, and I knew that the
first wave had started. After that I had no
leisure for thought, for we went over."
(m) " I was in a blue funk lest I should show
that I was. We had a sergeant, who was
killed afterwards at Le Sars, an Englishman.
I really believe he enjoyed it. He was an old
soldier who had been in South Africa, an elderly
man ; quite forty-five or more. He walked up
and down in the bay smoking his pipe, with his
eyes shining, and every now and then he would
say something about South Africa; not about
the fighting there, but about some man or other
who had got drunk or deserted, or stolen some-
thing. He made me feel that, after all, that is
what life is : you get together with a lot of
other fellows, in a pub or somewhere, and swap
a story or two about the blackguards you've
known, and then you go out and get knocked on
the head by a set of corner-boys."
(ri) " I tried to tell myself that I was doing
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 15
it for this or that reason, to make it sound
better ; but it didn't make it any better, I didn't
believe those grand things. When you are
waiting to be killed, those damned newspapers
seem damned thin, and so do those damned
poets about the Huns. The Fritzes are a
dirty lot, but they are damned brave, you may
say what you like. And being killed by a lot
of damned Fritzes is a damned bad egg, and
no amount of tosh will alter it."
North of the Ancre River the fight was to contain
the enemy; south of the Ancre we fought to advance.
In this volume nothing will be said of the containing
fighting to the north of the river, except that it was
severe and continuous. It needs, and will receive,
a volume to itself. In this volume the story will
be that of the advance, during the first stage of the
battle, which ended on the 14th of July, and of the
great attack on the night of the 14th of July, which
ended some three weeks later in the capture of
Pozieres, and the vital, highest points in the enemy's
second line.
In the attack of the 1st of July it happened that
our first success in the advance was at the eastern
flank of our sector, at the village of Maricourt, where
our extreme right joined the extreme left of the
16 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
French. This account of the battle will begin with
this eastern, or right flank of the advance, and will
proceed from point to point, westward and north-
ward, to the Leipzig above the Ancre, where the
tide of our success was stayed during these first two
stages of the battle.
From Maricourt, where the French were fighting
beside us, the thrust of the attack was in two
directions : towards the east, to the romantic dingle
of Faviere Wood, and towards the north, to the
brickworks of Montauban. These works stood
beside a road from Maricourt to Longueval, about
half a mile from Montauban village. They consisted
of two big blocks of building, one on each side of
the road, with outlying offices and furnaces. The
enemy had burrowed under them, so as to make an
underground fort, to which the ruins of the works,
soon nothing more than a heap of bricks, made
excellent head-cover. The fort was strengthened
with concrete, reinforced with iron girders. It con-
tained living rooms for many men, and emplace-
ments for many machine guns. As it lay on a
plateau-top, well back from a contour line, it had
a good field of fire in all directions. As at Mouquet
Farm, later in the battle, all that could be seen from
outside it was a heap of brick. This fort of the
brickworks was linked by communication trenches
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 17
to a strong enemy line which defended Montauban
and the two big adjacent woods of Bernafay and
Trones. It made an advanced redoubt to these
works, just as Mouquet Farm did to the Zollern
Trench. Two other outlying forts covered the
Montauban-Mametz Road, but, though these were
wired, it was thought that they were not likely to
be so dangerous as the brickworks. Our preliminary
fire upon the brickworks and Montauban was exceed-
ingly heavy, constant, and accurate. It could be
well observed and corrected from observation posts
in the trees behind our lines, and the enemy at this
part of the line had not, at that stage of the battle,
any great concentration of men and guns. It
happened that our attack upon the brickworks,
Montauban village, and the road down to Mametz,
all the extreme right wing of our battle, was swiftly
successful, and without great losses. The brick-
works had been so rained upon with shells that they
gave little trouble, and the Manchesters were estab-
lished there and in Montauban village before noon.
On the left of this successful attack, where our men
had to storm the steep little hill on which Mametz
stands, the approach was slower ; but in the late
afternoon Mametz, or what was left of it, was ours,
and the cellars and piles of rubble covering machine
guns had been bombed quiet.
2
18 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
No attempt was made to storm Fricourt during
this first day of the battle. It was thought that the
Salient there could be pressed on both sides and so
forced to surrender. The capture of Mametz gave
us a strong and commanding position on the east
flank of the Salient. Its west flank was threatened
by a strong attack upon all that side.
This attack, or rather this series of attacks, which
had for its objectives the three, four, or five sets of
wired lines in the enemy system above a perfect
natural glacis, brought our men across the chalk
slope, like a slightly tilted table-top, on the west side
of the Salient, into position on the west side of
Fricourt Wood. With one division entrenched in
Mametz and this second division to the west on the
line of the Contalmaison Road, the Fricourt Salient
was pinched in securely on both sides before night-
fall of the first day. It is said that many of the
Fricourt garrison, knowing that they were lost, crept
out, or rather were withdrawn, from the Salient as
soon as it was dark that night.
To the west of this Fricourt fighting, our men got
up Chapes Spur, following the spring of the great
mine there, and shut in the little village of La
Boisselle on that side. The attack upon La Boisselle
itself did not carry more than a part of the village.
This was not the fault of the attackers, but the result
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 19
of things which will be described later. While La
Boisselle held out, no progress could be made up
Mash Valley on its western side. To the west of
Mash Valley, the fort or stronghold of Ovillers held
out, exactly as La Boisselle did, and for the same
reasons, though just beyond Ovillers (on the western
slope of Ovillers Hill) our men secured enough
ground to flank the place on that side. Still further
to the west, on the Leipzig, our men stormed the
end of the Salient, beat and bombed the enemy out
of the quarry there, and contrived to hold it, though
they could not capture the Wonder Work beyond.
To the north of this a very gallant attack was
made upon Thiepval. Some of the troops in this
attack fought their way up the shallow valley under
what was called the Schwaben Redoubt, till they
reached a point called the Crucifix, near the enemy's
Second- Line System. This point, however, could
not be held, so that the end of the Leipzig Salient
was the most northern point permanently secured
by the first day's fighting.
The evening, like the day, was of a perfect summer
beauty, with a slight fine-weather haze. It was good
weather for flying, though not perfect for observa-
tion. The ground was dry and hard, and the
weather promised to be steadily fine. On the whole,
the first day of the advance to the south of the
20 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
Ancre had been very successful. To the south of
the Somme, where the ground for many miles
together is without those strongly marked tactical
features which give good observation and positions
easy to defend, the French had made triumphant
progress, with little loss, against a surprised and
shaken enemy. North of the Somme, we had
captured a big bow of land from Montauban Brick-
works to Mametz, and another, smaller, but important
bow, from Sausage Valley to Fricourt. Fricourt
Salient was almost ours; its surrender had been
made quite certain by the capture of the flanks of its
approaches. La Boisselle and Ovillers were both
closely pressed, the Leipzig had been mauled and a
part of it taken. Altogether (setting aside the French
conquests) we had won some two miles of front for a
distance of from half a mile to a mile ; that is, we
had advanced over about an eighth part of the front
attacked. Elsewhere, we had held and shaken the
enemy, had captured many prisoners and some guns,
and had destroyed many bays of trench and miles of
wire.
During all the day, and through a part of the night,
many strange things were done and reported. Many
small parties of our men attacking in the dust, dark-
ness, and confusion of the battle, over ground pilled
of its landmarks and cut into wandering trenches all
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 21
alike, all ruined, smashed, and full of dead, had gone
on in the tumult, far from any planned objective, till
they were lost. Even outside the trenches, it is not
easy to find one's way over that blasted moor of mud,
from which all the landmarks have been blown.
Inside the trenches it is almost impossible ; one sap
looks like another, one communication trench is like
another, one blown-in dugout, or corpse, is like
another, and all saps and trenches zigzag and run
out of the straight, so that one cannot tell direction.
These men, wandering forward, perhaps chasing
enemies, from one unknown alley to another, in
excitement and danger, far from any possibility of
direction or guidance, lost themselves, sometimes
half a mile behind the enemy front line. The history
of these lost parties will never be known ; but there
were many of them, from a company to two or three
men strong, and their achievements, if collected,
would make good reading. Some were destroyed or
captured ; others, building themselves barricades in
the enemy trench, fought all day long against what-
ever enemy came against them, and after fighting all
day, till darkness, they fought or picked their way
home, often bringing prisoners with them. It is
certain that some of these lost men working in
parties or alone, coming suddenly upon some hidden
machine gun and putting it out of action, were vital
22 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
to parts of our advance. The coming back of these
lost men, with their amazing stories, was one of the
wonders of the day.
The night was strange and terrible in other ways.
Over all the front of the battle there was a heavy fire
from the enemy and a going and coming of men.
Captured trenches had to be secured ; the new line
had to be marked and rounded off, with wire to the
front and barricades at the sap-heads. The new
positions had to be linked up with the old, so that
men and stores might be moved to them rapidly.
Much of them had to be repaired ; parts of them, for
one reason or another, were untenable ; from other
parts, thrusts had to be made, to clear away the
enemy. All this adjustment of the line and the
settling of what was to be or could be held had to be
done and tested under fire and in the half darkness
of a summer night by great numbers of men. All
over the battlefield there was a restless movement of
multitudes, as the battalions and the carriers moved
up and down. Prisoners were being searched,
examined, and sent back. The dead were being
gathered for burial and the wounded were being
picked up from the shell-holes and wrecks of trenches
where they still lay. Endless work of preparation
went on all over the conquered ground ; dumps had
to be formed and observation posts to be dug ; and
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 23
signallers with many miles of telephone wire had to
link up posts, stations, and positions with the various
headquarters. Behind our old lines there was a
similar uneasy heaving ; for the batteries were
moving up.
The night passed in this going and coming of men.
A business (as of ants), which seemed confused, yet
still had a purpose, covered the field. At the same
time the battle raged throughout the sector so hotly
that the running fire of flashes never died out of the
sky. All over the field the glimmers and bursts of
fire lit little places and showed groups of men at
work — path-clearers, signallers, carriers — preparing
for the morrow. In parts of the field, even at mid-
night, hand-to-hand fighting went on for trenches
and bits of trenches which the fighters could not see.
The great owls cruised over the field, crying their
cries. Star-shells rose and poised and floated and
fell down. The rattle and crash of firing, though
muffled in that Silent Land, sometimes rose up to
such a pitch that people in Amiens (twenty miles
away) got out of bed to listen, and felt their
windows trembling like live things to the roll of
that great drum.
At dawn on the second day our troops began to
put an end to the enemy salient at Fricourt.
Fricourt itself, the little village, is built at the end
24 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
of a tongue or finger of land which has a narrow
gully (with the Contalmaison Road in it) on the west,
and a narrow valley (with a stagnant brook in it) on
the east. The slope of the tongue, which broadens
as it rises, is upwards, towards the north, so that in
advancing upon it from the south one has to climb.
Slightly above the village, to the north and north-
east of it, is the irregularly shaped, straight-sided
wood of Fricourt, which is 1,000 yards long, narrow
near the village, but broader higher up, with an
average breadth of a quarter of a mile. This wood
was now (July 2) outflanked on the east by our
troops in Mametz, but it was still a strong enemy
fortress, with secure approaches to the salient and
secure lines of retreat to the higher fortified ground
behind it, further to the north. Like all other parts
of the salient, the wood was edged and crossed with
deep and strong trenches of the usual enemy pattern,
difficult to storm at the best of times. On the 2nd
of July this system of enemy trenches was blind with
jungle, partly abattis heaped by the enemy as ob-
struction, partly uncleared scrub, and partly tree-
tops cut off by our shell fire. The trenches at the
edges of the wood were strongly manned with rifle-
men and machine gunners.
Above the highest, northern part of the wood the
ground rises to a high chalk table-land about as big
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 25
as the wood (1,000 yards long by 4,500 broad) and
shaped rather like a boot raised to squash Fricourt
flat. On this small boot-shaped plateau were more
defences, designed, as a soldier has said, " more
as temporary unpleasantnesses than as permanent
works." The boot is strangely isolated by gullies
and valleys. At the heel is the deep gully of the
Contalmaison Road, at the sole is the valley of
Mametz, and at the instep is a deep romantic curving
valley, with the abrupt, sharply cut sides so often
seen in a chalk country. This last valley, from its
depth, steepness, and isolation, was known by our
men as Shelter Valley.
The defences of the boot-shaped table-land were as
follows : A line of trench known as Railway Alley,
which ran (N.E.) from Fricourt Wood towards the
toe ; odds and ends of work about (1) a farm, (2) a
copse called the Poodles, and (3), a crucifix along
the leg of the boot ; a strong field fortress in the
biggish copse called Shelter Wood, which hangs like
a curtain of shrubs and trees on the steep wall of the
valley, at the top of the leg; the trenched copses,
called Lozenge Wood and the Dingle, on the heel
and back.
Beyond Shelter Valley to the north the ground
rises to another hill of about the same height as the
boot. Men in important works on this hill could,
26 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
and did, fire upon our men during all the fighting for
the possession of the boot.
At dawn on the 2nd of July our troops advanced
to the storm of Fricourt Wood, the Contalmaison
Road, Shelter Wood, and as much of the boot-
shaped plateau as they could take. As they advanced,
the massed machine guns in all the trenches and
strongholds opened upon them. They got across
the field of this fire into Fricourt Wood to an in-
describable day which will never be known about nor
imagined. They climbed over fallen trees and were
caught in branches, and were shot when caught. It
took them all day to clear that jungle ; but they did
clear it, and by dark they were almost out at the
northern end, where Railway Alley lay in front of
them on the roll of the hill. Further to the north,
on the top of the leg of the boot, our men stormed
the Shelter Wood and fought in that 200 yards
of copse for four bloody and awful hours, with bomb
and bayonet, body to body, till the wood was heaped
with corpses, but in our hands.
Long before our men had secured the two woods
the Fricourt Salient was wholly ours. The village
was shut off from succour and escape by our capture
of the end of the wood at about ten o'clock that
morning. By noon all the dugouts in Fricourt had
been cleared of the enemy, and by tea-time they had
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 27
become posts and quarters for our own men. They
were the first first-rate enemy dugouts captured by
us in good condition. They were deep, well-made
underground dwellings, electrically lit, with walls
pannelled with wood and covered with cretonne.
They were well furnished with luxuries, equipment,
and supplies. The dugouts, which had once been
the headquarters of the hidden battery in the gully,
were taken over as dressing-stations. In one dugout
there were signs that a lady had been a visitor. In
another there was a downward-drooping bulge in the
ceiling, where a big English shell had almost come
through on some wet day when the ground was soft.
The shell had not burst, but no doubt it had
" lowered the moral tone some " in those who were
sitting in the room at the time.
During the 3rd of July our men stormed Railway
Alley and secured the whole of the boot-shaped hill
by capturing the other fortresses of the Poodles and
the Crucifix.
This Fricourt fighting increased our gains in the
centre of our advance. On the right, our men on the
top of the ridge of Montauban, though often sharply
attacked, and always heavily shelled, were preparing
to go down the hill to the attack of the enemy in the
valley beneath them.
This valley is a long, narrow valley between big
28 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
chalk bluffs. The eastern end of it runs into the
valley which parts Mametz from Fricourt. Near
this eastern end of it, mainly on the steep slopes of
the hill, is a long, bent, narrow ribbon of woodland,
so planted that each end commands one end of the
valley. This strip of woodland is not remarkable in
any way. It is a copse hanging on a steep chalk
bank, such as one may see in any chalk country.
The enemy had made it a strong redoubt to defend
the flanks of the valley, and men advancing north-
ward from Montauban had to take it before they
could reach the valley and proceed against the hill
beyond. From its appearance on the map, which
recalls (to the lively fancy) a looping caterpillar, this
wood was called Caterpillar Wood, though it is
quite as like a boomerang or a sickle. Just to the
north of it is a little fortified copsed dingle known as
Marlborough Wood. Preparation for the capture of
these two strongholds occupied the right of our
advance while Fricourt was being taken by our
centre.
Meanwhile, on the left of our advance, to the west
of Fricourt, our attack had straightened and cleared
the line as far as La Boisselle. At this village and at
Ovillers, further to the west, our progress was slow
and costly.
At both places there was almost no visible enemy
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 29
work. What trenches remained our men could
carry or blow out of trace, but the main strongholds
in both villages were not in trenches, but under
the wreck of the houses.
It so happened that the lie of the ground made it
very difficult for our men to see what was left of
either village. Both places lay on the sides of hills
in such a way that our best views of them were from
distances. Ovillers village lay along a road at right
angles with our front line. Rising ground and big
enemy parapets hid it from our front line. Ovillers
Hill hedged it in on the west side and Ovillers Wood
on the north ; on the east there was Mash Valley,
which still belonged to the enemy. We could see
Ovillers from the Usna Hill behind our front line,
but all that we could see were a few skeleton sheds
of plasterless woodwork still supporting a few tiles,
and a number of heaps of broken brick, among which
were heaps of earth and the stumps of trees. There
was nothing like order or arrangement in the village.
The place looked like a deserted brickfield, made
blind by the growth of brambles and weeds. There
was nothing in the place that looked like a fort or
seemed to hold an enemy.
La Boisselle was on a gentle slope above our front
line and shut from it by heaps of chalk. It, too,
could be seen from the Usna-Tara Hill. It, too, had
30 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
a few skeleton sheds at that time, and a great many
tree stumps, for, though it may seem strange to those
who see the place to-day, when the tree stumps are
gone, the village stood in a clump of trees, like so
many other Picardy villages.
Those who looked at it through glasses from the
Usna-Tara Hill could see little in it that seemed
defensible but a collection of mounds of chalk, rubble,
and broken brick. Further up the hill on which it
stood were enemy lines, with secure communication
along the spur from Pozieres. The village itself
seemed uninhabitable.
It may be that in the archives of the armies
engaged there are plans of the enemy defences in
both places, as they were before they were attacked
and counter-attacked. Both places were as strong
as cunning could make them. i Underneath both,
linking cellar to cellar, and foundation to foundation,
were deep, strongly panelled passages, in which, at
intervals, were posts for machine guns, so arranged
that the muzzle of the gun in its embrasure was only
a few inches above the level of the ground outside.
From without, one saw nothing, even close at hand,
but heaps of rubble and chalk. Within, were these
neat narrow galleries, with living rooms beneath
them, and secure underground bolt holes to positions
in the rear in case of need. They were large scale
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 31
examples of the Mouquet Farm type of fortress.
They were important points; for if they fell they
opened the way to the plateau and the whole position
south of the Ancre. Orders had been given to the
garrisons that they were to hold the places to the
death. . . . Both places were well supplied with
munitions and food. For water, they had under-
ground access to the wells of the villages. For men,
they had underground approaches quite unknown to
us. They were, in every way, well prepared, either
for siege or assault.
It is impossible to take fortresses of this kind
swiftly. Even if they are surrounded, as at Mouquet
Farm later in the battle, they may still hold out and
interrupt an advance. If they are shelled, they are
under the ground, unseen and unknown ; the shells
can only reach them by chance ; no man can say that
the artillery has destroyed them, even after days of
shelling. The area, perhaps a quarter of a mile
square, may be whelmed with gas for a week. The
defenders have their gas masks and oxygen cylinders.
The place may be stormed and covered with troops,
who may yet see no enemy, for there is no enemy to
be seen, except little spurts of fire from holes a few
inches long in the heaps of rubble on the ground.
Then if desperate, brave souls among the attackers
break into those heaps of rubble with pick and
32 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
shovel and get down into the galleries and fight
there, bombing their way through one black channel
to another, till the place is, as they think, clear, there
may still come a rush of reinforcements along the
tunnels of escape and the conquerors may be driven
out.
The attacks upon La Boisselle and Ovillers went
on throughout the second day of fighting. The pro-
gress made was slight, though many who watched it
have said that the fighting round those two points,
in these early days of the battle, was some of the
hardest, bravest, and bloodiest of the whole war.
The enemy knew that we should attack them and
how we should have to attack; the ranges were
known to an inch, and field batteries were concen-
trated upon them. Our men had to creep up a
glacis, through a barrage, to storm a fort which no
man could see. Often, in that groping in the chalk
heaps for some sign of the stronghold, the sudden
falling of a platoon was the first sign that the
objective was reached. Let the reader imagine any
quarter mile of hill-side known to him, and think to
himself that hidden in every ten yards of that space
is an infernal machine which will kill him if he
touches it or comes near it, but that he has to run
to that space, none the less, and destroy every
infernal machine, while fire and flying iron rain down
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 33
upon him out of the air. That was the task at
Ovillers and at La Boisselle. The men who went
against those two places did not " dodge death," as
the phrase goes, they walked and stumbled across a
dark lane which was death. There was a sort of belt
of darkness, or cloud, in front of those two ruins, and
in that cloud death crashed and whirred and glittered
and was devilish. Those who stumbled across it
unhit had to creep from pit to pit and from ruin to
ruin, looking for the holes in the ground through
which the enemy was firing. One man, finding an
embrasure through which a machine gun was firing,
crept to a cover and fired at the embrasure with his
rifle, while his mate, with a pick-axe, picked a hole in
the rubble above it big enough for them to fling their
bombs down. One evil point of both positions was
that they stood on spurs of hill which were roughly
parallel with each other, and not more than 600
yards apart. Men on the flank of one spur could
sit in cover in almost perfect safety, watching
our men attacking the other spur on the opposite
side of the valley. It was therefore possible for the
enemy to put a cross-fire with machine guns upon
either attack. Neither attack progressed far during
this hot summer Sunday of July 2.
But during the fighting at La Boisselle a party of
North Country English soldiers, attacking to the east
3
34 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
of the village, met with a success which had not been
planned for them. They got into the enemy's line,
and (as far as one can tell) progressed eastwards
along it, fighting their way, till they were in the
village of Contalmaison, nearly a mile from any
support. Here they were captured, but as Contal-
maison became the central objective, as soon as we
held Shelter Wood their captivity did not last
long.
Between the 2nd and the 14th of July, our advance
was, in the main, a sapping up to the enemy second-
line position, which we presently reached and
attacked. All of this sapping up was a bitterly hard
fight, in which our men and the enemy were hand to
hand for many hours together in all the contested
points. The men met each other face to face in
trenches and shell-holes and blew each other to
pieces with bombs point-blank. On the right, fighting
on these terms, our men won the Caterpillar Valley ;
on the left, they attacked La Boisselle, and pushed
on at Ovillers so that its capture became certain.
But in the centre, the enemy had an intermediate
position, where the fighting was more complex, more
difficult, and more bloody than on either of the wings.
This intermediate position consisted of two parallel
spurs of chalk between the enemy's first and second
lines. The eastern spur is almost covered with the
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 35
Wood of Mametz ; the western spur is clear of wood-
land save for two or three tiny copses. It is a
bare, swelling chalk hill, on the top of which there
stood (at that time) the ruins of the village of
Contalmaison.
These spurs lie between those formations in the
chalk which lent themselves to the enemy's first and
second main positions. Neither would come readily
into either big system. The enemy had not taken
special pains to fortify them, as the enemy reckons
special pains, but both were naturally strong posi-
tions, and both had been made stronger by art.
These places may now be described.
A boot-shaped chalk hill to the north of Fricourt,
and a deep, narrow, lovely, steep-sided gully, known
as Shelter Valley, to the north of the boot, have been
mentioned. Just beyond Shelter Valley, and bounded
by it as by a river, to the west and south, is the big,
bold, swelling, rather steep, shovel-headed snout of
spur on the top of which Contalmaison stood. Right
at the end of this snout, and low down, so as to be
almost in the valley, is an oblong copse called Bottom
Wood. Just above this, running diagonally across
the spur, is a linchet, once lined with trees. Just
above this there is a half-sunken track or lane
running parallel with the linchet. Just above this,
on the eastern side of the spur, was a strong enemy
36 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
work called the Quadrangle, so sited that men
approaching it from the south could be seen and
fired at from the work itself, from the high ground
on both flanks, and from the rear. Well-hidden
support-lines linked this work with Contalmaison
village (behind it) and with Mametz Wood (to the
east flank). This work defended the spur on the
eastern side.
On the west side, the spur was defended (a) by the
work in Shelter Wood, which we had won, (b) by two
fortified copses to the north of Shelter Wood, and (c)
by a field work (to the north of these copses) called
the Horseshoe. These western works were not on
the spur, but on that side of Shelter Valley which was
mainly in our hands.
Contalmaison itself lay on the top of the spur,
about 500 yards to the north-east of the Horseshoe.
It had a perfect field of fire in all directions. It was
trenched about with a wired line, which was strongly
held.
In itself, it was a tiny French hamlet at a point
where a road from Fricourt to Pozieres crosses a
road from La Boisselle to Bazentin. It may have
contained as many as fifty families in the old days
before the war. Most of these were occupied on the
land, but there was also a local industry, done by
women, children, and old men, of the making of
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 37
pearl-buttons. There was a church in the heart of
the village, and just to the north of it a big three-
storied French chateau, in red brick, with white and
yellow facings, and a turret enpoivriere in the modern
style. This chateau stood slightly above the rest of
the village.
The second or eastern spur lies parallel with this
Contalmaison spur, and is parted from it by a narrow
shelving valley or gully. It is more sharply pointed
and shelving than the Contalmaison spur, and
(perhaps) a few feet lower. Otherwise, it is of much
the same size. The extreme point of this spur is
bare chalk hill, but the bulk of it is covered with the
big wood of Mametz, which splits (about half-way
down the spur) into three projecting tines or prongs
of woodland, parted by expanses of fallow. On the
map, the wood looks something like a clumsy trident
with the points to the south, threatening our advance.
The spur rises due northward in a gradual ascent.
The highest part of the wood is at its northern limit,
and here, at its highest point, the ground suddenly
breaks away in what may either be a natural scarp
or the remains of an old quarry. The steep banks
are wooded over now, and much dug into for shelter.
Here the enemy made his main defence, with a
redoubt of machine guns and trench mortars.
It seems likely that before the war the wood was
38 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
without undergrowth ; but after the enemy occupa-
tion the shrubs were allowed to grow as screens to
the defence. The trees were fine, promising timber,
but not of great size in any part of the wood. Among
them were horn-beams, limes, oaks, and a few
beeches. The undergrowth, after two and a half
years of neglect, was very wild and thick, especially
in the northern part, where there was much bramble
as well as hazel-bush. Our bombardment had de-
stroyed many of the trees, and the enemy counter-
bombardment destroyed others during the fighting.
This made the going below even more blind and
difficult, for it had tossed down many boughs and
tree-tops, in full leaf, into the undergrowth, so as to
make a loose abattis, exceedingly difficult to pierce
or see through. In some of the bigger trees the
enemy had built little machine-gun posts, so well
camoufle or protectively coloured with green and
grey paint that they were almost invisible, even
from quite close at hand. Some heavy guns of posi-
tion were in the wood, and field guns were in battery
in the road behind the scarp at the wood's northern
end. In the lower part of the wood barbed wire was
strung from tree to tree, and machine-gun pits were
dotted here and there to command the few clearings.
Works on the Contalmaison spur, to the west, and
on the Bazentin spur, to the east, were so sited that
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 39
they could rake an attack upon the wood with a
cross, flanking, and plunging fire from half-rifle
range.
After the taking of the Poodles and Shelter Wood,
our men moved to the assault of these two spurs.
On the right they took position on the east flank
of Mametz Wood ; in the centre they attacked the
Quadrangle and the Horseshoe ; and on the left, in
pouring rain, in the mud of the Somme, they got into
the underground pits of La Boisselle, and made the
place ours. This pouring rain was a misfortune.
In modern war wet weather favours the defence.
It is especially harassing to the attacker when it
falls, as it so often has fallen in this war, at the
moment of a first success, when so much depends on
the roads being hard enough to bear the advancing
cannon which secure a conquered strip. Our success
between Maricourt and Ovillers had made it neces-
sary to advance our guns along a front of six miles,
which means that we had to put suddenly, upon
little country roads, only one of which was reason-
ably good, and none of which had been used for
wheeled traffic for the best part of two years, while
all had been shelled, trenched across, and mined, at
intervals, in all that time, a great traffic of horses,
guns, caissons, and mechanical transport. When
4o THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
the weather broke, as it broke on the 4th of July,
1916, the holes and trenches to be filled in became
canals and pools, and the surface of the earth a
rottenness. The work was multiplied fifty-fold and
precious time was lost.
The rain hindered our advance during the next
three days, though our attacks on the approaches to
Contalmaison and Mametz Wood proceeded. On
the west side of the Contalmaison spur our men
carried the fortified copses and won the Horseshoe,
after three days of most bloody and determined
fighting in a little field. On the east side of the
Contalmaison spur our men attacked the Quadrangle,
got three sides of it, and attacked the fourth. This
fourth side, known as the Quadrangle Support, could
be reinforced from Contalmaison and from Mametz
Wood, and could be observed and fired into from
both places, so that though our men got into it and
took it in a night attack, they could not hold it.
When the Horseshoe fell, early on July 7, a big
attack was put in against the whole of these two
spurs. It began with a very heavy bombardment
upon the ruins of the village and the wood, and was
followed by the storm of the village from the west
and south-west, and an advance into the wood. Our
men reached the village, took part of it, and found
(and released) in one of the dugouts there that party
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 41
of English Fusiliers who had been captured by the
enemy on the 2nd of July. At this point of the
attack a very violent, blinding rain began, which went
on for twelve hours. This rain made it impossible
for our gunners to see where our men were. In
order not to kill them, our fire on the ruins slackened,
and in the lull, in all the welter of the storm, the
enemy contrived a counter-attack, which beat our
troops back to the ruins at the south of the village,
where they established a line. The attack on the
wood brought our line forward through the outer
horns of copse up to the body of the wood.
For the next two days our artillery shelled both
wood and ruins, while plans were made for the next
assault. The only " easy " approach to Contalmaison
was from the west, near the Horseshoe, where the
slope is gentler than it is to the south or south-west.
The eastern approach was still blocked by the
Quadrangle Support. The " easy " approach was
not without its difficulties. Troops using it had to
go down a slope into Shelter Valley (here gentle,
open, and without shelter) in full view of the enemy
entrenched above him. As soon as they were in the
valley, under fire to their front, they were in full
view of the enemy round Pozieres, who could take
them in flank and rear. Worse still, the whole of
this part of the valley was commanded by well-con-
42 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
trived machine-gun posts on a little spur, some-
times called the Quarry Spur, 500 yards to the
north. However, this approach, bad as it was, was
easy compared with the others. On the 10th of
July the attack on the two spurs began again. In
the right and centre our men went into the wood
and into Quadrangle Support. On the left, they
went across the " easy " approach in four successive
waves, behind a " creeping barrage " or wall of shell
fire advancing in front of them. They got into the
village, without great loss. It was a compact village
grouped at a road-knot, with little enclosed gardens.
In that narrow space, in the cellars, in the dugouts
under the cellars, and in the sunken roads, like deep
trenches, close to the village, they fought what many
believed to be the hardest body-to-body battle of
this war. The village was very strongly held. The
garrison outnumbered the attackers ; in fact, the
enemy dead and prisoners outnumbered the attackers.
Contalmaison was won by the manhood of our men.
When the enemy broke from the village to escape to
the north, some Lewis gunners got on to them and
caused them heavy loss.
That night our line was secure in Contalmaison.
The Quadrangle to the right of it was ours, and more
than half of Mametz Wood was ours. Men can feel
what our soldiers faced in the storm of Contalmaison.
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 43
There they were in the open with the enemy's
trenches in front of them up above. But who can
tell what they faced in Mametz Wood ? The wood
was partly on fire and full of smoke. The enemy
was in strength and hidden. Our troops in the
attack were thrusting through brambles, shrubs,
scrub, and hazels, clambering over tree-tops and
broken branches, cutting through wire and stumbling
into pits, under what some have described as a rain
of bullets, which fell from above and drove in from
front and flanks. It is the biggest wood on the field.
It is more than 200 acres in extent. There were
four of our battalions in it at one time. Our men
had to command themselves; for the only orders
that could be given to them were to push uphill,
driving back the enemy, and to hold what they won.
After Contalmaison fell, on the evening of the 10th,
the position was easier, on the left flank of the wood.
The next day, after heavy losses, our men won the
end of the wood, and came out on the other side,
facing the Longueval Road, with the enemy main
second line straight in front of them not a quarter
of a mile away. In the last terrible attack on the
end of the wood they took all the machine guns and
trench mortars which had delayed the advance.
Meanwhile, away to the right, on the extreme
right flank of our advance, there had been much
44 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
bloody and heroic fighting for elbow room. Our men
had tried to widen the gap of their advance by
attacks to the eastward. They had captured the big
wood of Bernafay, near Montauban, and had attacked
the bigger wood of Trones, which lies parallel with it
a little to the east. They had captured Trones Wood
more than once, but could not hold it, owing to
enemy machine guns on the (very slightly) higher
ground outside the wood to the north and east.
In this fighting, our soldiers came for the first time
against the defences of the stronghold of Guillemont.
These assaults on Trones Wood and the capture
of Mametz Wood are generally reckoned to be the
last events in the first stage of the Somme battle.
The wood of Mametz was the last part of the
enemy's first-line and intermediate-line defences in
the path of our advance. Beyond it was the second
main position, which needed a battle to itself. The
first main position, in that part of the line, was all
our own.
In the twelve days' fighting, on the sixteen-mile
front, we had advanced upon a front of about 7J
miles, for distances varying from ij to 2\ miles.
It is true that within this captured territory one little
patch, the fort of the ruins of Ovillers-la-Boisselle,
was still defended, but it was surrounded, it could
not be succoured, and had to fall within a few days
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 45
(it fell on the 17th). The new line ran from
Authuille Wood, over Ovillers Hill, so as to shut in
Ovillers, across Mash Valley and beyond, so as to
shut in La Boisselle, across Shelter Valley and the
chalk hill, so as to shut in Contalmaison, and then
over the next spur, so as to take in Mametz Wood.
At Mametz Wood, the line turned south, down the
gully on the wood's east side for about 1,000 yards,
when it turned eastward into the valley of Caterpillar
Wood. This valley, mentioned and described some
pages earlier, runs roughly eastward for a couple of
miles from Mametz Wood. Roughly speaking, it
marked our line as it was at the end of this first stage
of the battle. Trones Wood, which marked our
extreme right, and though not held, either by us or
by the enemy, contained a party of our men who
could not go on, but would not come back, lies just
beyond the eastern end of this valley.
The expanse of ground won by us in these first
days of the battle was not large ; it made but a tiny
mark upon the map of France ; but in this act of
the war, which was so like a slow siege, victory was
not measured by the expanse of territory won so
much as by the value of the fortifications reduced.
The first-line fortifications which we had taken were
as strong as anything in the line and covered
Bapaume, with its knot of roads, and the railway
46 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
junction near it. The first line had been broken
without great difficulty, and though the enemy
resistance had stiffened and many more guns had
been concentrated against us, we were within striking
distance of his second line, from near Pozieres to
Guillemont, and if this fell with reasonable speed, it
was thought, by some, that we might be in front of
the ridge on which Bapaume stands before the
autumn rain made great operations impossible.
The second main enemy line (south of the
Ancre) ran from the high ground or plateau top
behind Thiepval along all the high part of the
desolate, flat, fertile downland which makes the battle-
field of the Somme. It runs pretty straight for 3J
miles, from the Ancre to the wood of Bazentin-le-
Petit. Here it bends a little, to take in the wood
and adapt itself to the ground, which is here thrust
into by the two gullies which border Mametz Wood.
It then crosses the eastern gully, takes in another
wood on a steep hill, called the wood and hill of
Bazentin-le-Grand, shuts in the village of that name
(which, in spite of its name, was smaller, though more
compact, than Bazentin-le-Petit), and continues along
the brow of steep, bold, rolling chalk hills for a mile
or two. The bold, rolling hills then merge themselves
with high plateau land, as dull, but not as desolate,
as the high ground above Thiepval. The wood of
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 47
Trones thrusts a straggling point of woodland into
this plateau. To the north of this point is another,
larger and broader, wood growing beside what was
once a straggling village, built of red brick, and
containing a prosperous sugar factory. The village
was called Longueval, the wood is the famous wood
of Delville. The line took in the wood, turned to
the south so as to cover the village of Guillemont, and
then ran away downhill, to the broken, steep valleys
outside Maurepas and the marshy course of the
Somme River.
The line was double throughout. The front line
was a deep, strong, well-wired, well-sited trench,
containing many dugouts, and one concrete fortlet in
the parapet to every fifty yards of front. The line
ran at the top of a gentle slope, in some places hardly
perceptible, so that the field of fire swept by it was
large, without dead ground and without natural
cover. The wire in front of the line was formidable,
though not so thick and strong as the wire of the
first-line system at the beginning of the battle. The
second line of this second system lay about one
hundred yards behind the front line. It, too, was
wired, and the line was a good and well-sited trench,
though without dugouts and concrete forts. Parts
of this second system became very famous, later in
the battle, under many different names. The ominous
48 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
and bloody names of Zollern Redoubt, O.G. i and
O.G. 2, were applied to parts of this second main
line. They will be mentioned in their proper place.
For two days after Mametz Wood was won there
was no main attack, but much work was done in
securing the captured ground, repelling enemy raids,
and making ready for the assault on the second
line. It was decided to attack this second line,
wherever our troops fronted it, at a little before
dawn on the morning of the 14th of July.
The dangers of the attempt were plain from the
lie of the ground. All of this second line was a
strong position, even without the hidden defences
which nothing but an attack could unmask. To the
left, in the centre, and on the right, the ground
favoured the defenders. The attackers had to ad-
vance uphill, under observation, to positions backed
and flanked by great blind woods. The wood on the
left (that of Bazentin-le-Petit), though visibly
less full of scrub than Mametz Wood, was 1,000
yards broad, sloping gently uphill, like Mametz
Wood, and quite likely to be as difficult to take. It
was certain to be crossed with many trenches and to
contain many hidden machine guns. The formation
in the centre, where the wood of Bazentin-le-Grand
sticks out on its knoll, offered a problem by itself. If
the enemy could hold it, he could make it impossible
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 49
for us to take the positions on its flanks. If the
enemy lost it, yet managed to hold either flank, fire
from that flank could make it untenable by us.
Setting aside the difficulties of the position to be
attacked, we had also to consider the difficulties of
our own position, which made a curving, irregular
bulge in the enemy front, big if compared with
ground won in an ancient battle, but really so small
that the centre, about the spur of Bazentin-le-Grand,
was within field-gun range from both flanks and
received fire from three sides at once.
During the 13th, white leading tapes had been
run out to the front as guiding marks to the attackers.
At about midnight of the 13th- 14th, strong patrols
went out to cover the advance. The battalions
named for the attack formed up in the open behind
these covering squads, and advanced across the open
to their positions. There was no moon, and the
night, though a summer night and not naturally very
dark, was cloudy. All the ground over which the
battalions advanced was under fire, and littered and
obstructed with the mess of war. In the advance,
the men had to cross trenches inclined at all angles
to their line of march ; they had to pass dugouts,
gun emplacements, lines of wire, fallen trees, wood-
land, brushwood, and copses, and to keep touch,
none the less, with the platoons to right and left. It
4
50 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
was as difficult as a night march can be, though the
distance to go was in all cases less than a mile
(uphill). Even for so short a distance, an advance
in line of battle by night, over ground so broken,
would be a difficult feat in time of peace.
Most soldiers (French and English) who saw the
Somme fighting have agreed that this bringing up of
the army to attack on the 14th of July was a feat of
arms of which any nation might be proud.
The artillery preparation for this attack was fiercer
than anything which had gone before it. Longueval,
already much battered, ceased to be a village, and
Delville Wood took on the appearance of a wood in
winter. It was soon to take on the appearance of a
wood in hell. At a little after three, in the rather
cloudy morning of the 14th, the fire heightened to
the roll of an intense and terrible barrage, and at
half-past three, in a grey light, "when there was just
sufficient light to distinguish friend from foe at
short ranges," the artillery lifted and the men went
over.
The fight which followed was one of the hardest
and most successful in which British troops have
been engaged. On the left, our men broke over the
line into the wood of Bazentin-le-Petit, which was
defended much as the wood of Mametz had been.
Our men stormed its trenches, cleared out the
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 51
machine guns and heavy guns hidden in it, and had
won right through it, and come out at the northern
end with many prisoners and much material, by
seven o'clock. In the centre, our men got into the
wood of Bazentin-le-Grand, and into the village of
that name beside it. They beat the enemy down the
hill beyond, and chased him up the opposite slope,
where, in a rush, which won the praise of a French
General who watched it with admiration, saying
that he had never seen such extreme bravery, they
got into the village of Bazentin-le-Petit and made
it ours.
At this point our men were right up on the high
ground of the plateau or plain, with High Wood,
like a lonely island of trees, away to their right.
Before the village was secure as a military position
the enemy counter-attacked. The attack was beaten
off at about noon, but it was repeated a little later
with stronger forces and pushed home. This second
attack was repulsed after a hard fight. It was
followed by a most resolute and extended attack in
which the enemy put in his reserves, with orders that
the village was to be retaken and the position
restored. This attack, falling heavily on our front
from the Flers Road in the direction of the
cemetery, drove us out of the village as far as the
cross-roads near the church. Here our supports
52 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
came in, the village was retaken, and our men beat
the enemy back, with heavy losses, to his trench.
At the same time, as the enemy was much shaken
from the last of his four defeats, an attempt was
made upon High Wood. Cavalry which had been
held in readiness, in case a chance should offer during
the battle, were now sent forward on the flanks
of some infantry to clear the standing corn which
covered the field as far as High Wood. The wood
itself, which, like all woods within the enemy system,
was trenched round, and so netted with lines as to
be a very powerful fortress, was shelled heavily. The
cavalry (a squadron of lancers) cleared the corn, and
the infantry assaulted the southern face of the wood,
got into it, went through most of it, and took
some prisoners there. The wood is a big planta-
tion, say, 700 yards long by 500 across. The
northern side tilts slightly downhill towards the
long, bare, gentle slope which made the field of
the autumn fighting. The southern side, which was
the side attacked by our men on the 14th of July, is
nearly flat. The trees are well grown but not big
timber, and the undergrowth at the time of the battle
was thick. In the heart of the wood there were at
least two permanent concrete emplacements for single
heavy guns.
Men who were in this afternoon attack on the wood
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 53
have spoken of the exultation with which they went
in. Firstly, they had beaten the enemy throughout
the day, from post to post, and in every one of three
big counter-attacks. Secondly, they had won clear
from the strip of land poxed with the blastings of
two years' fighting. Those who went over that land
later in the battle may find it difficult to believe, but
on the 14th of July all the field in front of the wood
bore harvest, and the wood was green. The coming
into that undefiled country was a delight to the men.
It is a fact that many of them cheered " for being
among green things again." Thirdly, the knowledge
that cavalry were fighting side by side with them
gave them great joy. They felt that it was a sign
that the war of trenches was going to give way to a
war of movement, and that perhaps they were on the
eve of great events. They took all the wood except
the northern point, which was flanked by the switch
line to Flers on one side, and by the boundary trench
or hedge of the wood on the other. The fighting
was very bitter here and very deadly. Long after-
wards the bones of an enemy machine gunner,
lodged on the spike of a tree, showed what the fight
had been.
This taking of High Wood was the high-water
mark and limit of the tide of conquest of the 14th of
July. It brought us, with a rush, right on to the top
54 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
of the plateau and (in High Wood) almost to its
northern edge, so that our men could see the great,
gentle, beautiful valley, coloured with the harvest in
all its sweep, and the distant ridge beyond, dark with
woodland, and lined with red brick chimneys above,
covering the prize of Bapaume. The left and centre
of our attack had endured and achieved more than
had been expected. On the right, towards Longueval,
our success had been as notable.
On the right our men attacked, roughly speaking,
due north, keeping strong flanking parties to the
east of their advance to check any attack from the
enemy fortress of Guillemont. They rushed the long,
straggling northern end of Trones Wood on the
slope above them and set free that patrol of two
companies of Kentish soldiers who had been fighting
there all night surrounded by the enemy. A thrust
was then made to the east, towards Guillemont,
while the main attack went on, up the slope, to
Longueval and the edge of Delville Wood. Our men
got into Longueval, cleared the two straggling streets
to the road-meet in the heart of the village, and there
came against the defence which was to make the
place a hot corner for some time to come.
From the heart of the village, where the roads
meet near the church, the ground slopes downhill
towards Flers. The northern half of the village was
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 55
built upon this sloping ground, which is a narrow,
shallow valley, a quarter of a mile broad, at right
angles with the village street. On both sides of the
road there were plantations and orchards, not now
to be distinguished from the main ruin of Delville
Wood, but at the time of the fighting they were
separate and fairly trim. The road through these
plantations was lined with ruins, which the enemy
defended ably. To the north of the shallow valley
the ground rose up to the plateau crowned by High
Wood. Most of this plateau was still strongly held
by the enemy, who could see from it, fairly clearly,
through the thinned wood, what was happening in
the northern half of the village. The wood and the
plantations masked the approach of troops coming
to the relief of this part of the village, so that, what
with a fairly well-observed artillery fire and a well-
hidden line of support, the enemy had an advantage.
By midday, the battle of Longueval had become a
most bitter hand-to-hand struggle, in which our men
gradually got the mastery. Most, or very nearly all,
of this northern strip was in our hands by four
o'clock, though two points just outside the village —
one in the horn of Delville Wood, and one in an
orchard on the hill to the west of it — still held out.
All this area was soon to become the scene of some
of the most terrible of the fighting of this war.
56 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
Delville Wood was very soon to earn its name
of Devil or Devil's Wood. The enemy shelling
concentrated on this area and became most
terrible.
The fighting here was not without compensation.
One who was there remembered the taking of
Longueval with pleasure, for in clearing out an
enemy dugout he came upon a store of cigars.
" Jolly good mild cigars ; enough to give every man
in the platoon a box, and so many that the Boche
must have been giving cigars as an issue, at any rate,
to the officers. We thought at first that they may
have been poisoned and left behind as a booby trap,
but we soon proved that." Another, in the same
attack, saw a young private come out of an enemy
dugout with a bottle of brandy. He very rashly
brandished this bottle, crying out, " See what I've
got." An old sergeant saw him, and said : " You're
too young to be drinking that poison. You hand
that over to me ;" so the sergeant had it. But a
captain who had seen the matter said to the sergeant :
" You're too old to be drinking that poison. You
hand that over to me." So the captain took it and
kept it. One little action of devotion may be quoted,
for even though it deals with eating and drinking, it
was yet another of those countless heroisms of the
carriers which are so seldom noticed and rewarded,
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 57
though they happen every day in all weathers and
under all fires.
A platoon had been fighting all day in the
Longueval district, and had reached a strip of old
enemy trench just outside Delville Wood. They
tumbled into the trench and prepared to pass the
night there. All were dog tired, much shelling was
going on, and all, though hungry, had given up all
hope of food. At about ten that night, while they
were getting what sleep they could in the devilish
racket of the shelling, one of the officers was roused
" by a little pale voice asking, ' Is Captain
here ?' " It was the battalion mess-servant who had
brought up dinner for the officers in a basket. He
had picked his way in the dark from Montauban,
carrying a heavy basket stuffed with good things,
over two miles of road blazing with the enemy
barrage. He had brought hot soup in a thermos
flask, a tin of salmon, hot bully beef with two
vegetables, and some cheese and bread, hot coffee and
a bottle of port. When he had served this dinner
and collected the dishes and bottles he carried the
basket back by the same road, past the same dangers,
to Montauban.
This fight of the 14th of July gave us a large stretch
of the enemy second line, brought us well on to his
fortified plateau, and threatened the great, gently
58 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
rolling expanse between Delville Wood and Bapaume.
Our men had taken many prisoners and much war
material. The enemy had lost heavily in killed and
wounded, and had been badly shaken in the fighting
round Bazentin, on a front of about a mile. When
darkness came, our men were at work securing the
new positions and linking them up with the line they
had left just before dawn.
The new line nowT ran roughly south to north,
parallel with the Albert- Bapaume Road, from Con-
talmaison to beyond Bazentin-le-Petit. It made a
bend at Bazentin, and ran north-easterly to High
Wood, which was a salient. From High Wood it
bent back, in a south-easterly line, to Longueval
and Delville Wood. From Delville Wood it ran
southerly, past Trones Wood, towards the Somme
River. The attack had been a great success, and had
given us more than all that we had aimed for.
There were inconveniences in the new position.
All our gains since the beginning of the battle made
a salient, liable to be shelled from the front and from
both flanks ; but at High Wood we held a salient
beyond a salient in a position of great importance
to the enemy. It was therefore certain that High
Wood would be made very difficult to hold. Further
to the right, Delville Wood gave observation over so
great a tract that the enemy could not afford to lose
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 59
it ; that, too, was certain to be fought for to the last
ditch. Our troops attacking or defending Delville
had strong enemy positions within half rifle-range on
their right flanks and rear, and the only road of
supply from Montauban could be shelled from two
fronts. Worst of all, the weather was against us : it
began to rain hard ; the ground became a quagmire ;
the movement of troops and guns became difficult ;
and every hardship of war became harder and every
difficulty worse. When the cloudy morning came
and the fight raged up again, there was bad observa-
tion, and our aeroplanes could not detect the new
enemy gun positions. With the dawn, attack and
counter-attack began : our attacks against the strong
points near Longueval, and on the right of our
advance towards Ginchy ; the counter-attacks against
High Wood and against our hold on Delville Wood.
During this second day of the fight, High Wood, the
narrow salient, became untenable from shelling.
The wounded were carried out of it and the position
abandoned, though our line remained not far from it.
At this stage of the battle it became imperative
that our extreme right wing, which joined the French
extreme left wing in the neighbourhood of Trones
Wood, should win room for itself by a thrust to the
east. It was necessary that the enemy should be
6o THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
pushed back from his position between Delville
Wood and the Somme, so that the dangerous right
angle in our line might be straightened out. Already
an intense shell-fire on the Montauban Road, which
was the only line of supply to the troops in that
angle, made our position difficult. It was plain that
the enemy had now brought up his reserves of men
and guns, and that the main agony of the Battle of
the Somme, the struggle for the high ground of the
chalk plateau, from the little town of Combles, where
the dene-holes are, to the Schwaben Redoubt above
the Ancre, was about to be fought. The weather,
which was in the main against us throughout the
battle, was against us now. The third week in July,
1916, when this struggle began, was wet ; indeed the
latter half of the year, while the fighting raged, was
wetter than usual, and the last quarter by far the
wettest within the memory of man. The weather
did not affect the result of the battle, but it delayed
it by many weeks.
The main need was to widen our position by
winning more ground to the east. The enemy knew
this as well as any soldier whose fate led him along
the road by Bernafay Wood in those days. From
the moment when our men cleared Trones and
entered Delville Wood on the 14th of July, he con-
centrated a great artillery upon all that angle of the
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 61
line and poured a continuous rain of shells on our
hardly-won positions there. This increased daily
for three days and nights, and on the 18th of July,
after a very heavy shelling, a powerful enemy counter-
attack came down on Delville Wood, and began that
series of battles which killed every tree in the wood,
and strewed every yard of it with the rags of human
bodies. The attack drove us out of most of the
wood and out of some of the village of Longueval
beyond it, into a line of poor trench which no enemy
could ever carry. At the same time, all the right
angle of our line was shelled and shelled again, with
barrages of all calibres, designed not only to stop
our massing for an attack which might give us more
room there, but to prepare attacks against us, and to
destroy the advantages which had been won.
Though under the fury of this attack the right of
our advance was, for the moment, checked, our left
(five miles away to the west) was widening the
salient thrust by us. On Ovillers Hill, the under-
ground garrison of the Ovillers fortress had sur-
rendered, after a fine defence, and our men had
pushed up the Ovillers Spur towards the head of
Mash Valley. From the Ovillers Spur, looking east-
ward, over the broadish, gently shelving Mash
Valley-head, they saw the first jutting-out of the
parallel spur along which the Albert-Bapaume Road
62 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
runs. At the jutting-out they saw the cemetery of
Pozieres, among a clump of cypress trees, and the
straggling end of Pozieres village, stretching among
trees along a lane towards it. This was to be the
next prize to be fought for. The attack which won
Ovillers, cleared Ovillers Hill, and opened up Mash
Valley, secured the western approaches to Pozieres.
On the same day (the 17th) the troops near the wood
of Bazentin-le-Petit bombed out towards Pozieres
along the lines of trenches known as O.G. 1 and
O.G. 2, secured a part of them, and wired them in
against any counter-attack. This, though it did not
secure the eastern approaches to Pozieres, at least
secured a part of them. At the same time the
shelling from our guns concentrated upon Pozieres,
and on the long strip of copse or wood beside it.
Towards the end of this third week in July, in hot,
clearing, summer weather, some batteries and bat-
talions of fine men were moving along the roads
towards the battlefield of the Somme. They had not
been " in " in that battle before this, and although
they did not know, it seems that they had generally
guessed that they were to go in against Pozieres.
These men and batteries belonged to the Australian
and New Zealand Army Corps, and they were coming
to the first big battle that had happened since they
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 63
landed in France. It is said that these troops, as
they moved along the roads in the July days between
hedges covered with honeysuckle and shadowed by
ranks of plane-trees, felt that they were marching in
fairyland ; for they had seen no such earthly beauty
in their own lands over the sea, nor in Egypt and
Gallipoli, where they had served. Perhaps no
soldiers who have been hotly engaged in a modern
battle ever really want to go into another. They go
in the knowledge that it is their duty, and that their
going may end the war and bring peace. These
soldiers went in that spirit, but it is said that they
felt satisfaction that they were to take part in a big
battle with the enemy against whom they had enlisted
to fight. About the 20th and 21st of July they came
into camp within sound of the battle, and their
officers were able to examine the ground which they
were to attack. Their attack was to be the crowning
act of that part of the battle. It may be well to
describe here the nature of the ground of that little
place, which for some weeks was as famous to our
nation as the town of Troy.
* * * *
Pozieres was a little village of no interest and no
importance strung along the Bapaume Road near the
top of the plateau. It was in the main one street
of buildings facing each other across the road.
64 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
The houses of this street were not all dwellings.
Some of them were byres, granaries, and barns, so
that the main effect of the street was rude. Most of
the houses were built of red brick ; the byres and
barns were of course plaster or clay daubed upon
wooden frames. In the years before the war the
village contained about 300 people, most of whom
got their livings from the land, for all the plateau
was good farm land. It has been said that some of
the people (as at Contalmaison) made pearl buttons,
but the chief work of the place, as of the Somme
battlefield, was farming. The church was the chief
building, and next to it in importance was the school.
Both seem to have been modern buildings, of no
interest. I do not know whether there was any
market-place. There was no chateau. The road
ran straight through the village in a north-easterly
direction towards Bapaume. It may be said that it
cut the village in two, for it divided the one row of
houses from the other. In writing of the Battle of
Pozieres one has to think of this road as a mark or
boundary, cutting one part of the battle from the
other. Our advance in the battle was towards
Bapaume, in the north-easterly direction. It may
be better to write of the two halves of the village as
lying east and west of the road.
Though the village was poor and without glory it
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 65
was the home of men who had given its windy perch
a beauty. The village was planted with trees. On
the eastern side of the road, at the southern end
of the village, these trees made a wood of fine
timber, 200 yards long by 100 yards across.
Orchards and outliers from this wood ran along the
outskirts of the village on this side, behind the
gardens of the backs of the houses. In the village
street there were a few trees. Just beyond the
village (at both ends) the fine plane and poplar trees
which mark so many French highways made the
road a shady avenue. Two hundred yards from the
last house, at the north-east end of the village, the
road dipped towards Bapaume. Just before the dip
down, on the highest ground of the plateau, and a
few yards to the west, or left-hand, side of the road,
was the village windmill.
The eastern side of the village street had fewer
houses in it than the western side. About midway
in the village, the abreuvoir, or village watering-place
for stock, opened from the road on this eastern side.
It was an oblong, surface-drainage pond fenced with
brick and shaded with elm-trees. On the western
side of the road where the main village stood — for on
this side the houses had a southern aspect — the
ground rose slightly, perhaps as the result of genera-
tions of building. The school and the church both
5
66 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
stood on this side of the village, though well back
from the road. Near the church, a lane or country
track ran westward from the high road towards the
village of Thiepval, two miles away. A few buildings
stood near this lane, well to the west of Pozieres
proper. Beyond them (to the west) was the head of
the Mash Valley, which ran parallel with the high
road down to La Boisselle. On the western slope of
this valley, perhaps 200 yards from the village, was
the village cemetery.
Seen from some little distance, from either side of
the road, Pozieres was like several other Picardy
villages : a church tower and some red-tiled roofs
among a big clump of fruit and timber trees, wood,
and orchard. Being high up, it was waterless, save
for a well or two and the rain. It was also as windy
as Troy and as visible. From the north and west it
was conspicuous for many miles. Men walking near
the windmill could be seen from Serre, Pys, Irles,
and Loupart, from three to six miles away. From
the north-east it was screened. From the east, it
could be seen within a distance of two miles as a
kind of ridge or skyline above the shallow pan
which may be called the head of Sausage Valley.
On this eastern side a distant view of it was blocked
by Bazentin Wood. From the south and south-east,
from Contalmaison and from the high road between
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 67
Mametz and Montauban, it was plainly visible as a
clump of trees, and the road to it from Contalmaison
was a most conspicuous, whitish, straight line pointing
to it. From the south-west, from the high ground
of Usna Hill, it appeared as a few buildings, with
oofs of red tile in front of a woodland.
The routes by which our troops could attack
Pozieres were all in full view of the enemy, who had
so arranged his trenches and machine guns that to
approach from any of the routes was scarcely possible
in daylight. The approach by the Mouquet Valley
was flanked and enfiladed by fortresses not yet
reduced ; those by the Ovillers Hill and Mash Valley
were commanded throughout their length by the
Pozieres plateau. The route by the Albert Road
over the big central spur led up a natural glacis,
strongly wired, trenched, and flanked. The gully or
valley between this central spur and the next to the
east contained some dead ground, though the greater
part of it could be seen from the village. This gully
or valley has been mentioned (in the Contalmaison
fighting) as the Quarry Gully, from two small chalk
quarries on its eastern bank. The small spur to the
east of Quarry Gully hid the next valley — which may
be called Hospital Valley (because a dressing-station
once stood there) — from the village, though all this
valley was plainly visible from the enemy trenches at
68 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
its head, which enfiladed it. Beyond this, to the
east, is the big spur on which Contalmaison stood.
At the north-eastern side of this spur is the wood of
Bazentin-le-Petit, which stands on ground a little
higher than that on which Pozieres stands. In a
way it turns Pozieres, for troops stationed there
are directly on the village's left flank. Troops
advancing from this wood towards Pozieres had a
better chance of success than from any other point.
Near this wood, as has been said, they had secured a
part of the enemy main position, and had proceeded
along it, westward, bombing from bay to bay in both
trenches, to within a third of a mile of Pozieres
itself.
A road or track runs in Quarry Gully. Another,
rather better road, runs in Hospital Gully. Both
lead into Pozieres.
The Quarry Road starts from the Albert-Contal-
maison Road at the top of a rise. Just at the junction
it is sunken rather deep between banks. When the
enemy held that ground, before the beginning of the
Battle of the Somme, he dug into these banks for
shelter of various kinds. At the junction of the two
roads he had dug a field dressing-station, which was
taken over and used by our men when we had won the
ground. The junction of the roads was often called
Dressing-Station Corner for this reason. But it was
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 69
always a dangerous place. The enemy shelled it day
and night, throughout the Pozieres fighting, as a
likely piece of road for the passing of men and muni-
tions. Before the end of the Pozieres fighting, the
junction itself, the strip of road leading downhill from
it towards Contalmaison, past the much-blasted copse
called Bailiff Wood, and the turn to the left into
Quarry Valley, were generally known as Suicide
Corner.
The dressing-station was destroyed by a shell
during the attack. All the Corner is much battered
by shell fire ; but the road to Contalmaison, being
needed for supply, has been kept in good order. It
is now much wider than it was at the time of the
fighting. It, too, runs between deep banks at this
point. Bailiff Wood may once have cast a shadow
on it on summer days, just here, at noon. Since the
fight for Pozieres, that wood has cast no shadows
save from perhaps a dozen spikes of burnt branch, on
one of which a magpie has built her nest.
The Corner, towards Pozieres, is a rough, steep
spur slope, terraced with those regular, steep steps or
banks which the French call remblais, and our own
farmers linchets. As usual, the enemy had dug
down into these linchets for shelter from our fire.
On the level terraces on the tops of the linchets
he had once placed his batteries, and his artillery-
70 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
men had lived in the dugouts near-by. In one of the
officer's rooms there was a library of good books.
Early in the Battle of the Somme, our fire made the
Corner untenable, the batteries were destroyed or
withdrawn, and the dugouts — with their books, furni-
ture, and officer's possessions — were abandoned to us.
All these linchets are much pitted and blasted by
shell-fire. There are a few currant bushes on them
here and there. The earth is bald, dried reddish mud
with a little grass on it. In the winter it looked like
the skin of some animal sick of the mange.
From the slopes of the Corner, standing in the
wreck of the battery position, one can look up the
Quarry Valley and see Pozieres at the head of it.
From this point, the village seems to stand on a
backbone or ridge of earth on the northern skyline.
In early July, when our men first saw Pozieres from
the Corner, it was still fringed with wood on this side,
and though the shells had knocked some of the trees
away, the place was green and leafy. The trees are
on slightly lower ground than the village, for all the
fall of the land there is to the south and east. From
all this eastern side of the Albert Road, the line of
the road along which the village ran makes a kind of
ridge or wall. It was a green wall once ; early in
the battle the dust of the shells had covered it with
grey. In the heat haze of July, 1916, that grey wall,
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 71
with the blue air trembling above it, was the last
thing seen by many hundreds of men.
The Quarry Valley is only fifty yards across. On
the eastern side of it is the little spur, before men-
tioned, with its battered copse. The spur, which was
once mainly plough land, is fleeced with coarse grass
and dandelions. The many shell-holes are reddish
all over it, though the red is mixed with dirty frag-
ments of chalk. The spur itself is a small roll or
heave of the ground, perhaps forty feet higher than
the valley and one hundred yards across at its widest
point.
The slope of the spur on its western side facing
the Corner is naturally steep, and has been made
steeper by man. A little way from the Corner the
bank has been cut into for chalk, and the quarry,
though hardly more than a recess, gives some sort of
shelter. It is about twenty yards long by ten across,
and the depth of the cutting, from top to floor, may
be twenty feet.
A little further towards Pozieres the Quarry Road
forks, and near the fork there is a second quarry in
which the chalk is much more clearly laid bare.
This quarry is twice the size of the other and about
half as deep again. It gives better shelter, as it is
deeper than the other and equally well screened,
by the lie of the bank, from the view of an enemy
72 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
artilleryman in Pozieres village. From this point
the road to Pozieres, by either fork, is across the
wreck of battle. All the ground has been blasted
and gouged by shells. Men have dug shelters there
and heaped up sandbags, and the shells have blown
all into pits till the earth is all tettered with the pox
of war. Here and there, the approach may still be
made by trench. The grass and some of the hardier
weeds have begun now to grow in some of those
furrows ; in others even the earth seems to have
been killed, like the men buried there. From these
gullies of dried, broken, pitted, and blasted mud,
torn into holes, often twenty feet long, ten feet
across, and seven feet deep, like nothing else on
earth, one goes up the slope to that little Troy upon
the hill. Presently one passes into an array of ram-
pikes and stumps over which the hand of war has
passed. It is like some Wood of the Suicides. A few
trees in it are still recognizable as trees ; some even
push a few leaves from their burnt stumps. There
are ashes, nuts, limes, and hawthorns. The others
are stumps, with bunches of splinters at their ends,
or erect hags, or like the posts of some execution
corner where men are garotted and shot and hung
on the cross. Here the ground is so gouged and
blasted that the shell-holes run into each other like
sloughing sores. The trenches run for a little, are
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 73
blasted into the landscape, emerge again for a few
yards, and again disappear in some long lake of
water or mud. All the ground is littered with the
waste of war — tins, equipment, smashed weapons,
shells, bombs, bones, rags of uniform, tools, jars, and
boxes. In one place, above the wood, in the village
itself in what was once the road to Contalmaison,
are the traces of an enemy battery position, with
broken wheels and many of the wicker panniers used
for carrying shells. This road was once hedged, but
fire has trimmed the hedge. There are brambles in
it still, and dwarf beech, young elm — which will never
grow to be old — and the wayfaring-tree. From this
point one can enter the village. It was near here
that the English-speaking race first entered the
village, in the summer night's charge of a year ago.
On both sides of the village street the shells dug
confluent pits, then filled them, then dug them again,
then dug others, then more, then more, till the
ground became a collection of holes with mounds
among them. The shells fell thus, on all that
ground, for hours and days and weeks and months,
till in all the squalor of mud and smash that was
once Pozieres no sense was left of the home of men.
One can see that a village once stood there, for there
a re broken bricks in the mounds, and old iron farm
implements in some of the shell-holes, and the r oad
74 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
has been made like a road again. The houses lie in
heaps of rubble and small bits of brick, and where
the buildings were important these heaps are bigger
than elsewhere.
Three or four landmarks remain on one side of
the village and one on the other. On the western
side of the road, north of the village, is the mound
or hump of the windmill. This is now a heap of
earth, cement, and broken concrete stuck about with
railway girders. Further south, on the same side, is
a part of a single wall of reinforced concrete. This
strange grey fragment, which stands on a mound,
and was once a part of a very strong enemy fortress
built of concrete and iron girders, stands on the site
of the school. At a distance it has (to myself) some-
thing the look of a loaded camel lying down; but
some observers describe it as three flat anvils in a
row. It can be plainly seen for many miles in nearly
every direction. Further south again, on this side,
is the biggish heap of powdered brick, riddled iron,
earth, hewn stone, bent metal, and filthy papers that
was once Pozieres church. At the southern edge of
the village on this side, above a lane which straggles
round to the cemetery, is another grey concrete
fragment, famous in its way. It stands well up on
the bank above the lane, overlooking the spur, Mash
Valley, and the distance of France, with the trees of
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 75
the Amiens Road upon it. It is a little observation
post, which could, on occasion, be used as a machine-
gun emplacement. A concrete stair near it leads
down to a cellar twelve or fifteen feet below. This
little post, barely big enough to hold two men, is less
conspicuous from a distance than the school-house
fragment, but being in the line of our attack was
more of a landmark to our soldiers, who called it
Gibraltar. Beside it, almost sunk into the mud, are
two old enemy gun emplacements covered with
balks of timber.
On the eastern side of the road there is only one
landmark. About the centre of the village, close to
the road, is a hollowing in the mud, as though there
had been more shells all together there than else-
where. This filthy hollow holds water even when
most of the shell-holes are dry. At one side of it,
low down, are four or five rows of brick where the
foundation of a wall once stood. This place is what
remains of the abreuvoir or watering-place for
stock.
None of these places gives any feeling of the habi-
tation of man. No one, looking at the site of the
village, can feel that the place was once the home
of 300 human beings, who were born and
married there, who lived in that street and got good
out of those fields, and heard the bells of the church,
76 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
and went up and down to market. Looking at the
place, one can only feel that it has suffered, and that
all round it human beings suffered, in hundreds and
thousands, from agony and pain and terror, and that
it has won from this a kind of soul.
On the western side of the village, beyond the
hedges which once closed the gardens at the backs of
the houses on that side, the ground slopes into the
head of Mash Valley in a slope so mild that it is
almost perfect as a field of fire. If you turn your
back upon the village, walk for half a mile across
the Mash Valley-head, and then look at the village,
it appears as a skyline or ridge, with a few tree-
stumps upon it, and those other heaps or marks : the
windmill, the school, and Gibraltar. Looking round,
from that point, one sees only a markless wilderness
of shell-holes, full of water or ice in the winter, and
of dryish mud at other times, between which, in the
summer, a coarse grass full of weeds thrives knee-
deep. From the west through the north to the east
the land is all this wilderness as far as the skyline.
It is a desert of destruction, with no mark to guide
upon it. Up those slopes, all looking alike, on to
those plateaux all looking alike, our men advanced
upon trenches all looking alike. In that desert they
had to advance upon objectives which were indeed
points on a map, but in the landscape were like every
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME yy
other place in sight. The sea has more natural
features than that battlefield. The difficulties of the
battle were not wholly those of shells and machine
guns, but of keeping touch and direction during an
advance.
Now that it is out of cultivation, one can find wild
flowers all over that battlefield. In July, when the
fighting began, it grew the flowers common in culti-
vated chalk soils at that time of the year: the purple
hardhead, pale purple scabious, pale blue chicory ;
and the common weeds of cultivation : yellow ragwort,
red poppies, and blue cornflowers. In the spring
and earlier summer it is thickly set with dandelions.
On both sides of the road, but especially near the
windmill, there are patches of strongly growing
henbit. To the east of the road, on the plateau, and
in and near the quarry and middle gullies, there are
patches of speedwell, ground-ivy, dead-nettle of two
kinds, one with pink, one with yellow flowers (which
also grows freely in Mametz Wood). Among the
grass one can also find dock, milfoil, starwort, stitch-
wort, " a white, small, starry, cuppy flower," Venus
needle, daisy, field madder, Lamb's lettuce, a cut-
leaved wild geranium, a veronica, and the little
heart's-ease pansy. Perhaps some day, when Aus-
tralia makes a Campo Santo of the earth of Pozieres,
these plants may be set there. In their place at
78 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
Pozieres, they will grow in Australian dust for
ever.
The best view of Pozieres is from the east of the
Roman Road, from the direction of the main Aus-
tralian attack. From a point 1,200 yards S.E. from
the windmill, the appearance is of a valley of sand,
with grass in stretches, and Pozieres as the wall of
an old town on the horizon. The Authuille Wood is
just visible over the saddle or dip in the road, and
the town is like a long, low dyke of sand sloping
gradually up behind the road. Near the windmill,
the actual crest, this dyke is more marked. From
Contalmaison, one sees the line of the road (the line
of the ridge) with some forty stumps of trees beside
it. One can see the traffic on the road passing along
the ridge, becoming dim against the background of
the village, and then standing out again, clear against
the sky as it nears the windmill.
The enemy defences at the time of the attack
ringed in both village and wood with trenches.
The cellars and piles of ruin had been fitted with
machine guns, and the mill, the school, and Gib-
raltar, were all fortresses of the usual strong, defensive
type. The external defences seem to have been :
(a) To the north : the two lines, old German
lines one and two (O.G. 1 and 2), which were
dug so as to enfilade any attack upon the village
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 79
from the east. At the time of the assault we
held these lines to within 600 yards of the
village. They lay well to the north of the ruins
of the village itself.
(b) To the east : a line shutting in the village
and wood, on the line of the old hedge of the
wood. This was strongly held.
(c) A sunken light-railway track, which could
be held as a trench.
(d) A line or part of a line still further to the
east, dug so as to enfilade Hospital Valley, and
to link up with the O.Gs.
(e) To the south: a big wired line close to
the village, linking it with the intermediate
positions at Contalmaison and Mametz Wood.
This line ran in front of the lower part of the
village, so as to defend the cemetery. From it,
minor communication lines ran to the south-
west and south-east. All these lines could be,
and were, held by the enemy to check our
advance. In one of them, last spring, the last
surviving hen of Pozieres laid some successful
eggs.
During the night of Saturday- Sunday, July 22nd-
23rd, the troops took up their positions for the attack
on the village. The attack was to be made upon the
80 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
eastern and southern faces of the position by
Australian troops and English Territorials. The
English were to advance from the direction of
Ovillers Hill and Mash Valley upon the cemetery
and that straggling end or outlier of the village which
stretched out towards Thiepval. Their right was to
rest upon the Albert- Bapaume Road, their left on
the strong, newly converted enemy lines on Ovillers
Hill. The Australian left was to touch the English
right at the road, to push up, in the main direction
of the road, from Suicide Corner and Contalmaison,
by way of the spur, the Quarry Road, and Hospital
Road, so as to close in on the village from the south-
east. The Australian right, forming up from about
Contalmaison Villa, outside Little Bazentin Wood,
to O.G. i, with their faces to the west, were to charge
across the plateau, taking whatever trenches there
might be in their path, right into the village, through
the wood or copse, and across the gardens to the
houses. It was known that the garrison of Pozieres
had been relieved by a fresh division, and that, like
other enemy reliefs, this division had brought in
plenty of food and drink. The attack had been pre-
pared by some days of shelling over the whole area.
Not much of the village was standing, though one
observer speaks of some parts of red-tiled roofs near
the cemetery. The smash and ruin were general, but
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 81
the place was not obliterated, nor were all the trees
razed. The weather had cleared. It was hot, dry,
dusty weather, with much haze and stillness in the
air. At midnight on the 22nd-23rd of July the attack
was timed to begin. It was the first big fight in
which the Australians had been engaged since the
Battle of Gallipoli, almost a year before. Then they
had fallen in in the night for an attack in the dark,
which won only glory and regret. This time the
battle was to be one of the hardest of the war, and
there was to be glory for all and regret for very many,
and the prize was to be the key to the ridge of
Bapaume beyond the skyline, with possible victory
and peace. At midnight, when the men had reached
their starting-places, the attack began, and a great
wave of Australian infantry went across the plateau
towards the east of the village. A part of this wave
attacked the enemy who were still holding out in
O.G. i. The rest crossed the plateau, got into one
enemy line, which was lightly held or held only by
dead men, took it, got into another (really the sunken
track of the light railway) which was held more
strongly, took that, and so, by successive rushes,
and by countless acts of dash and daring, trying
(as it happened) to find objectives which our guns
had utterly destroyed, they reached the outskirts
of the place, across a wreck of a part of the wood.
6
82 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
They made a line from about the southern end
of the village to their starting-place near Bazentin
Wood.
When the daylight came on that Sunday morning,
the Australians were in the village, on the eastern
side of the road with the road as their front. Beyond
the road they had to their front the tumbled bricks
of the main part of the village. To their right, they
had a markless wilderness of plateau tilting very
slightly upwards to the crest on which the O.G. lines
ran. Australians who were there have given accounts
of the fighting which won them this position, but, as
usually happens in a night attack, those who were
there saw little. It seems to be agreed that the
second enemy trench was more strongly held than
the outer line, and that the right of the attack, which
came under direct enfilading fire from the O.Gs.,had
the hardest task. Some have said that the eastern
outskirts of the village were lightly held by the
enemy, and that not more than 200 enemy dead were
found in that part of the field after the charge,
which is very likely, for it was the enemy's custom
to hold an advanced post with a few men and many
machine guns.
On the left of the attack, on the western side of
the road,where the English Territorials were engaged,
•the objectives were swiftly taken, so that by dawn the
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 83
village was shut in as firmly from the south as from
the east.
When it was light, both sides tried to reconnoitre.
Neither side shelled the village for fear of killing its
own men, since neither side, as yet, knew how the
lines ran. The two sides sniped at each other from
the ruins across the road. Early in the forenoon an
Australian officer took a small party across the road
into the main ruin of the village, and creeping from
one heap of bricks to another, surprised, bombed out,
and caused the surrender of a section of the enemy,
including a regimental surgeon in his dressing-
station. The work of linking up the captured posi-
tions went on all through the day under a shell fire
which increased steadily as the enemy observers
came to know what was going on. The sniping
sometimes increased into hot rifle fire.
By ten o'clock on that Sunday night, the Austra-
lians had plotted out the main stations of the
Pozieres garrison. They attacked across the road,
bombed out some more dugouts, and cleared the
scattered groups of enemy out of the trenches, re-
mains of trenches, converted ditches, and old gun
emplacements, where they still made a kind of
organized resistance. Having won these places, they
linked them up into a system, and dug a communi-
cation trench by which men could pass across the
84 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
road from one half of the village to the other. This
gave them (and secured to us) nearly the whole
village, and though there were snipers and bombers
who troubled our men, the enemy made no de-
termined counter-attack in force against the village
itself.
When day dawned on Monday, 24th of July, the
Australians had secured and were occupying prac-
tically the whole of the village, and faced, roughly
speaking, to a northern front. In front of them was
the gentle depression of the northern end of Mash
Valley. To their right the ground was almost flat,
though trending very slightly uphill from them to
the O.G. 1 and 2, only 200 yards away. A hundred
yards behind the enemy lines was the wreck of the
famous windmill, marking the highest part of the
crest, and the nearest point from which the Australians
could hope to see into the valley beyond. The
Australians' next task was to attack the O.G. lines
on their right flank and front, seize the windmill on
the crest, and then to take from the enemy his power
of observation and his control of all that system of
defence.
Before the attacks began, the enemy bombardment
came down. At first it was simply a heavy fire
upon the village, but it soon increased to a barrage
on the district. Sometimes it would lift, to search
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 85
Contalmaison and the road past Suicide Corner;
then it would play upon the valleys leading up to
Pozieres and upon those recesses or quarries near
them where the little shelter might harbour stores
or wounded men. Then it would fall on village and
wood in lines and simultaneous dottings of explosion,
till a dull red, dirty haze covered the site of the
village, and smokes and stinks of all colours and
poisons smouldered and rotted in it. In this haze
and poison the Australians lived, and dug, and held
the line. The first bombardment lasted for four
days and nights, and in all that time there was little
fighting, by either side, in that district ; yet all are
agreed that those four days made up some of the
hottest battle of this war.
The tactical aim of the Australians was to drive
the enemy off the high land. The tactical aim of the
enemy was to shell the Australians off it. All are
agreed that their shelling was some of the heaviest
ever seen. It made a fog all over the high land, and
into this fog the Australians disappeared to a feat of
endurance which few will know how to praise. So
many acts of courage are hot and quick with inspira-
tion, they must be as great a joy to do as to read
about. But those swift acts of decision are for
individuals, not for masses of men. The holding of
the ground of Pozieres was done by brigades at a
86 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
time. Their casualty lists will show the nature of
the work. The appearance of the ground and of the
graves marks it to the visitor. It was as hard a
service as any that has been on this earth.
One who was there has said: "I went in from
Sausage Valley way, past Suicide Corner. At first I
only noticed that they were shelling Contalmaison
like hell, but when I got down by the Quarry and
saw what they were serving out on Pozieres, by God,
I felt, you may call this war, I call it just sending
men to be killed. By God, they were sending some
stuff over as we went up. The first thing I knew I
was completely buried. I was in a trench when it
happened, but there was no trench when I got out.
That went on all the time that we were in. We
would get some kind of trench dug, and then it
would be blown in, and the men buried or killed,
and all the time there were crumps, whizz-bangs, and
tear-shells till you couldn't hear or see. We would
get some kind of a line made and try to make a dump,
but you might as well have tried to build a dance-
hall and give a dance. I looked back one night and
saw the dump in the Quarry burning. They had
brought up a lot of lights and star-shells and dumped
them there, and a shell had got in among them and
set them all 'off together ; they lit up the whole
sky."
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME S7
Another who saw the fighting has said : " About
the end of July, I had to go to the CCS. (Casualty
Clearing Station) at . The CCS. was in the
school, at the bottom of a courtyard, and there were
benches round the courtyard full of Australians who
were all suffering from shell-shock, and they were
jumping about and couldn't keep their hands and
feet still ; I never saw such a sight. One of the
doctors said to me : 'I don't know how it is. The Aus-
tralians must be more highly strung or something.
I get more shell-shock cases from among them than
from any other units.' ' You silly ,' I said. ' These
poor have been in at Pozieres, where they've
been shelled to hell for the best part of a week, and
nobody else so far has had anything like it.' "
A third has said : " I got a crump on the head the
night I first went in, so I don't know much about it,
except that that damned trench called Centre Way
was a damned unpleasant place to be in."
Centre Way, which is still partly to be traced, ran
obliquely from close to the church of Pozieres in a
north-westerly direction towards the O.G. lines,
which it reached about three-quarters of a mile
to the west of the windmill. In the markless
plain of mud, it was the middle one of three
trenches by which the Australians approached the
O.G. lines.
88 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
A fourth has said: "A damned funny thing
happened in the early days of Pozieres. The trees in
the wood then were not like what they are now, all
shot to pieces. Some of them were quite good trees,
and we had an O. Pip in one of them (artillery
observation post), and had an officer there with a
telescope. He was up there with his telescope about
the 25th of July. There was a hell of a barrage
going on behind him, for they were putting one
across the gullies to stop men coming up. He was
looking at this barrage one moment, when he saw an
Australian coming through the barrage across the
open. He was trotting along, almost naked, as we
were in the Peninsula, and this officer expected to
see him blown to pieces every second, but he came
through the barrage all right, and then the officer
recognized that it was his own servant coming with
a letter. He had to look away for a while, and the
next thing he knew the fellow was shouting at him
from the foot of the tree. He expected that it
would be some urgent thing that might be going to
alter the whole campaign, so he put down his tele-
scope, and climbed down and got the letter and read
it. It was from the veterinary surgeon, and it said,
1 Sir, I have the honour to report that your old mare
is suffering from an attack of the strangles/ He
acknowledged the letter, and the man went back
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 89
the way he came, across the open, hopping through
the barrage, and got back all right."
Few men can face such a thing as a modern
barrage without awe ; none the less, these men did
face it, and lived in it, for days together. Under the
fiercest of its terror, they bombed out towards the
mill, got the mill — or the mound on which it once
stood — but could not hold it. Coming again they
got the mill and made it theirs, and spreading out
to the left, they got the O.Gs., and with the English
Territorials they moved forward, up the head of
Mash Valley, on to the formless, markless, pocky,
mud-barren. Up near the windmill, when they got
it, they could peer from their lines through the
smoke into the Promised Land.
The ground slopes down to the northward from
the windmill, at first very slightly. Three hundred
yards from the mill, there is a linchet, some four feet
high, running roughly N.W.-S.E. across what was
then the Australian front. Beyond this, the ground
slopes much more rapidly for some 300 or 400 yards to
the village of Courcelette among its trees. When the
Australians took the windmill, there was a greenness
upon all this slope of hill. The trees of Courcelette
were leafy ; there were houses in the village ; and the
great, wide, gently sloping valley beyond was green.
It was not long to remain green, but at the Australians
go THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
first sight of it it was green and lovely, though in
the hands of the enemy. The Australians, looking
down from the windmill across the valley, saw that
there was no ground for a strong, defensive line
nearer than the ridge of Bapaume, three miles away.
They knew that the enemy could not hope to make
a permanent line nearer than that, for all the nearer
ground was under direct observation. They realized
that the capture and holding of the Pozieres Ridge
would lead to the capture of all the valley below it ;
not immediately — for there is no position which can-
not be defended for a time in modern war as long as
there are machine guns — but certainly, and before
very long. As they looked over the valley, they saw
and heard some great explosions not far below them,
in and near Courcelette. The enemy was hurrying
away his field guns and blowing up his dumps of
field gun ammunition.
This capture of Pozieres may be said to mark the
end of the second stage of the great battle. The
first stage ended in the capture of the first line along
some miles of front. This second stage ended in
the capture of the second line along some miles of
front, thus deepening the wound in the enemy defen-
sive system.
The third stage, beginning even then, in the mark-
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 91
less mud towards Thiepval and on the Guillemont
plateau, was to widen the wound.
* # * ♦
Enemies and detractors who hate us have said
that, after all, the battle was no great affair ; that it
took, indeed, a few trenches, at great cost, but did
not defeat the enemy nor relieve our Allies, and that
we sacrificed our Colonial troops rather than expose
our own. Lies are best left to Time, who is the
surest confounder of malice; but some must be
answered. To these few liars it may be said that
the battle was the first real measuring of strength, on
equal terms, between the enemy and ourselves, and
that, therefore, it was a great affair. In the early
years of the war our picked men had fought their
picked men, in the proportion one of ours to seven
of theirs, and our men had held them and been killed.
In the Battle of the Somme, the picked men on both
sides being gone, the fighters were the average of
each race, and the result proved that superiority of
the British which none in our army had ever doubted.
It is true, that our men took a few trenches at great
cost. It is also true, that they failed to take a few
trenches at the first attack. The same is true of all
fighting in all wars. But the result of the battle is
written plain on the map of France. There on the map,
92 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
and still more plainly on the sacred soil of France, it
is marked, that the battle beat the enemy out of his
picked defences, where he was strongest, and drove
him back, from ditch to ditch, over a ground where
all things were in his favour, in spite of all that he could
do, for not less than twelve miles. It is not claimed
that this was a decisive defeat of the enemy, to rank
with the battles which end wars, but it was a sound
beating. He did his best to hold his best fortifications,
and he could not hold them : he was beaten out of
them. If the battle failed to save Roumania, as some
of our enemies (not very wisely) cry, it relieved
Verdun. As to the lie, that during the battle we
sacrificed our Colonial troops rather than expose our
own, the graves of our men, in the mud, by the
hundred and the thousand, from Maricourt to
Gommecourt, and in every acre of the field, are
sufficient answer. For each Colonial lost, not less
than nine or ten of our men were lost.
In the area of our advance, between Thiepval and
Maricourt, the danger was nearly equal in all places.
No part of the enemy line was less than a first-class
fortress ; all parts were well contested ; and over all
parts there was a heavy fire of cannon of all kinds
and of machine guns. The Leipzig, Ovillers, La
Boisselle, Fricourt, Mametz, Trones Wood, Bazentin
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 93
Woods, Mametz Wood, Contalmaison, Pozieres, the
Village, Mill, and Cemetery, were all as dangerous
and as difficult to storm as the objectives of famous
sieges : " Number Four Bastion," the Redan, " the
Green Ridge," and the rest. At all of them, the
attackers moved to the attack knowing that they
went to the near certainty of wounds and death.
The area of the advance of this first month of the
fight is not large. One could walk round the area,
visiting all its famous places, in one summer day, for
the distance can only be twenty miles all told.
Spring and summer have laid their healing hands
upon those places since the fighting. The covering
of the grass has come to hide the evidence that those
slight slopes and tumbles of brick were once
terrible both to take and to hold. Men standing in
what is left of Delville Wood, or in the wilderness
which was once Pozieres, will find it hard to believe
that for days together fire rained upon those places,
and that men by the hundred and the thousand were
buried there, and unburied, and killed, and maimed,
and blown into little fragments. Our men lie every-
where in that twenty miles circle, sometimes very
thickly, in platoons and companies of the recognized
and the unknown. They were our men. Men of
our race will never walk that field without the
94 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
thought that the wind blowing there took the last
breath of many of our people, and that the dust under
foot is our flesh.
Our own men will never want for praisers. But
in this great battle, some came as guests, from many
thousands of miles away, to fight what they saw to
be the battle of free communities. Many years
hence, when the facts and passions of this war are
dim, English writers may forget, not what these men
did, but the measure of their gift to us. Now, while
the facts are fresh, one may give their guests first
place.
Many battalions did nobly in the difficult places of
the battle. The field at Gommecourt is heaped with
the bodies of Londoners ; the London Scottish lie at
the Sixteen Poplars ; the Yorkshires are outside
Serre, the Warwicks in Serre itself; all the great
hill of the Hawthorn Ridge is littered with the
Middlesex; the Irish are at Hamel, the Kents on the
Schwaben, and the Wilts and Dorsets on the Leipzig.
Men of all the counties and towns of England, Wales,
and Scotland lie scattered among the slopes from
Ovillers to Maricourt. English dead pave the road
to La Boisselle; the Welsh and the Scotch are in
Mametz. In gullies and sheltered places, where
wounded could be brought during the fighting, there
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 95
are little towns of the dead of all these places :
" J°lly young Fusiliers, too good to die."
The places where they lie will be forgotten or
changed, green things will grow, or have already
grown, over their graves. It may be that all these
dead will some day be removed to a National grave-
yard or Holy Field. There are three places, in that
wilderness of the field, which should be marked by
us. One is the slope of the Hawthorn Ridge, looking
down the Y Ravine, where the Newfoundland men
attacked. Another is that slope in Delville Wood
where the South Africans attacked. The third is all
that great expanse from Sausage Valley to the wind-
mill which the Australians won and held. Our own
men lie as it was written for them. But over the
graves on these three places it should be graven, that
these men came from many thousands of miles away,
to help their fellow-men in trouble, and that here
they lie in the mud, as they chose.
Not long ago, on that old battlefield, an Australian
said : " In the Maori war once, some English
surrounded some Maoris and sent to tell them to
surrender, since they could not escape. The Maoris
answered : " We fight * Akka, akka, akka ' (for ever
and for ever and for ever). This makes a good war-
cry for us."
96 THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
When, in future time, the Australian Memorial is
placed over the mound of the windmill, to stand
sentinel over so many splendid bodies which once
went with that cry through the Peninsula and up
that plateau, those three words will be sufficient
dedication, and sufficient story, for ever and for ever
and for ever.
BILLING AND SONS, LIMITED, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD, ENGLAND
7 9 1 ?y
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